Then she leaned forward and touched the window.
"Pull that down, please," she directed.

"I am stifling." He obeyed, and the rush of cold, wet air had a curiously quietening effect upon the nerves of all of them.

Raindrops hung from the leaves of the lime trees and still glittered upon the windowpane.

On the way towards the river, the masses of cloud were tinged with purple, and faintly burning stars shone out of unexpectedly clear patches of sky.
The night of storm was over, but the wind, dying away before the dawn, seemed to bring with it all the sweetness of the cleansed places, to be redolent even of the budding trees and shrubs,--the lilac bushes, drooping with their weight of moisture, and the pink and white chestnut blossoms, dashed to pieces by the rain but yielding up their lives with sweetness.

The streets, in that single hour between the hurrying homewards of the belated reveller and the stolid tramp of the early worker, were curiously empty and seemed to gain in their loneliness a new dignity.